Tony Craeger

From childhood, Tonio Kröger knows he is different. He knows that, no matter how much he wishes it, he does not belong to the neat and proper world of his respectable father, nor to the happy and bright world of his schoolmates who love dances and illustrated books about horses. As he grows up, he will obey the dark calling of art and the isolation it demands. However, his melancholic longing for the simple, honest, and untroubled life of the bourgeois will continue to burn within him. And somewhere there, in the chasm between the two worlds, creation will be born.

I admire the proud and the cold, those who dare to wander the paths of great, demonic beauty, despising "man," but I do not envy them. Because if there is anything capable of transforming a scholar into a poet, it is precisely this very bourgeois love of mine for everything human, living, and ordinary. Warmth, kindness, and humor stem from this love, and it even seems to me that perhaps this is the love which, according to the Scriptures, even if you speak all the languages of men and of angels, without it you are nothing but a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.